Speed is one of the most important skills to have in the sports world. It is often the biggest topic among coaches, sports performance specialists, and athletes. In the past, most coaches believed that speed was something you either had or didn’t have. However, that theory has long been laid to rest as sports professionals have learned speed can be taught and developed.

Improvable areas of speed development in team sports consist of the following:

  • Starting, acceleration, stopping, and cutting
  • Stride length
  • Stride rate
  • Speed endurance
  • Sprint form

The information in this article applies to developing acceleration and top speed for athletes that participate in team sports. It will probably be of less interest to sprinters (although this information can be useful in developing faster sprinters). Speed conditioning for sprinters tends to be linear in design while team sports are multidirectional.

What does science say about speed?
We’ve learned from sports science that running speed consists of two simple things. The first is stride length, which is basically how much distance you cover between each step you take when sprinting. The second is stride rate, which is how fast your legs move when sprinting. If you’ve ever watched the Looney Tunes cartoon and saw how fast the road runner’s legs move you’ve seen a perfect example of stride rate.

There are three components that affect stride length and stride rate. They are as follows:

  • How often you make contact with the ground
  • How much muscular force you can deliver during ground contact of each stride
  • How much ground contact time is available to deliver that force

Force per stride dominates
The predominate factor in sprinting for teenagers and adult athletes is the ability to generate and deliver additional muscular force to the ground. If you watched the 2008 Summer Olympics and saw Usain Bolt dominate the 100 meter and 200 meters in world record fashion, this would be a great example of how a powerful athlete can propel his body in a given direction. Bolt didn’t have the fastest leg turnover, but he was able to cover more ground per stride than his competitors. That being said, the speed in which the legs move isn’t as important as the amount of force per stride. When you cover more ground per stride, you increase your stride length. Improvements in stride length have been attributed to increases in lower body strength and explosiveness, not from intentionally trying to manipulate your technique by overstriding.

To get faster, put a more powerful motor in your car
The stronger you are relative to your body weight, the more force you’re going to put into the ground and the faster you’ll be. There have been countless examples of Olympic weightlifters who were able to keep pace with sprinters for at least the first 30 meters of a race. This isn’t because of speed but because of strength. Having stronger legs in general gives you the power to transfer into running. Anything that strengthens the muscles of the hips, lower back, and legs will help you get faster.

So can a 160-lb athlete deadlifting 300 lbs always run faster than a 200-lb athlete deadlifting the same weight? “Most of the time but not always, limb length, tendons, bones, neurological differences, and other factors affect how efficiently force gets delivered into the ground and expressed by different individuals. A guy with longer limbers, smaller joints, longer tendons, and better reflexes naturally has an advantage” (Baggett, pg 15). Let’s compare Deon Sanders and Emmitt Smith. Let’s say Deon can deadlift 350 lbs and Emmitt can deadlift 500 lbs. Emmitt should easily beat Deon in a sprint, correct? Not necessarily. Deon’s body structure is much better suited for sprinting, and what force he can deliver gets expressed much more efficiently. The only way Emmitt is going to win is if he can make up for it in superior horsepower.

Now let’s look at Emmitt’s deadlift. He is stronger, but that isn’t enough in this situation to overcome the structural advantage that Deon has. Here’s a different scenario where structural advantage isn’t enough. “Let’s compare Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis. In this instance, the pit-bull body structure of Johnson was able to overcome the perfect lines and greyhound body type of Lewis due largely to Johnson’s 600-lb squat. Unfavorable leverages can sometimes be overcome with favorable strength levels” (Baggett, pg 15).

A simple approach to speed development
It’s important to note that for any given individual, an increase in strength at any given body weight almost always transfers into increased speed, providing the technique in the sprint remains the same. So a 170-lb athlete deadlifting 500 lbs will always run faster than another athlete weighing the same but deadlifting 300 lbs as long as his technique remains the same. So the simplest way to increase your speed is to get as strong as possible at a given body weight while maintaining or improving the efficiency of the sprinting movement.

What about maintaining or improving the efficiency of the sprint itself? There are a couple of ways to improve this such as running technique drills, analyzing videos, and improving mechanics. With the exception of the start and the ability to maintain top speed over longer distances, my experience has shown that mechanics is paramount to speed development.

Neurological and technical improvements in movement come from one of two factors—intermuscular coordination or intramuscular coordination. Intermuscular coordination is the coordination between different muscles groups involved in a movement that allow you to carry out the movement. Intramuscular coordination is the increased firing and coordination within a given muscle, which allows more force to be put out by a muscle in a particular movement.

When a skill or movement is first being learned, intermuscular coordination dominates. For example, when a baby is first learning to walk or crawl, he will trip, fall, or lose his balance. As he learns to better control all the muscles involved in the movement, he will be more successful in performing the activity. Now when he has mastered the movement, he will begin to get faster as a result of increased coordination and horsepower. This is intramuscular coordination.

With regards to training, during the initial stages of movement mastery, intermuscular coordination requires more frequency to become proficient. Even with lifting weights, beginners make the best progress working out three times per week because they have to learn the exercise. As the individual becomes proficient at the movement pattern, it will become ingrained in the brain and frequency is no longer as important.

Once the skill is learned, further performance improvements result from increasing the horsepower behind the muscles involved in the movement. For that purpose, intensity is more important than frequency. This is why intermediate and advance athletes have found that they get their best improvements on a two times per week schedule while beginners require at least three.

Speed training—less is more
Sprinting is a high intensity event, much different from powerlifting or long distance running. Quality should take precedence over quantity. Each time you sprint, you sprint with the intention of getting faster. An athlete should sprint at a high intensity and rest fully between reps. Sprinting in a state of fatigue only improves conditioning, not speed itself. “A speed training session should be terminated as soon as our performance (speed) on a given rep is slower than the previous or 300 total yards or whichever comes first” (Baggett, pg 9). Remember, when training to enhance speed, we want the athlete to remain as fresh as possible to ensure greater effort and maintain good sprinting mechanics.

General recommendation
The best advice I can give is to do enough sprinting to maintain efficiency in the act of sprinting itself and spend the majority of the time focusing on developing more power into the ground relative to your body weight, therefore putting a bigger and more powerful motor in the car. For this to occur, it may mean lowering your body fat percentage, gaining muscle and strength, or improving the ability to express your existing strength levels.

A sample training schedule
Based on experience and research, I’ve found that simple strength focused cycles alternated with explosive oriented cycles give awesome results for most athletes except those who are advanced. In the strength cycle, you focus on increasing general strength while in the explosive cycle you focus on expressing that strength. In each phase, you do enough to maintain the qualities you aren’t really focusing on. For example, when in the strength phase, you would do enough sprinting to maintain the ability to sprint while focusing mainly on building a solid base of general strength. For both the strength and explosive phases, I recommend training only two times per week, as this has been shown to give better results, provide a decrease in injury, and prevent overtraining. To keep the length of each phase simple, stay in each cycle for one month only.

A basic set up for the strength phase would look something like this:

Monday

  • Easy warm up
  • Plyometric drills, 2–3 sets of 5–10 reps of your choice of exercises
  • Starts, 5–10 reps
  • Deadlifts, 4–5 sets of 3–5 reps (try to add weight each week)
  • Pull-/chin-ups, 3 sets of 5–10 reps
  • Hamstring work, 4–5 sets of 5–10 reps

Friday

  • Easy warm up
  • Sprints, 30–50 yards for time (stop when you begin to slow down)
  • Light deadlifts
  • Pull-/chin-ups, 3 sets of 5–10 reps
  • Split squats, 3–5 sets of 6–8 reps per leg
  • Hamstring work, 4–5 sets of 5–10 reps

A basic set up for explosive training would look something like this:

Monday

  • Warm up
  • Starts, 5–10 reps
  • Sprints, 20–30 yard sprints for time (stop when you begin to slow down)
  • Jump squat variations with 30%, 3 sets of 5 reps
  • Jump squat variations with 15%, 3 sets of 5 reps
  • Hamstring work, 2 sets of 5–8 reps

*Percentage is based on maxed weight lifted in a deadlift or squat.

Thursday

  • Warm up
  • Starts, 5–10 reps
  • Sprints, 40 yard for time (stop when you begin to slow down)
  • Depth jumps, 4 sets of 3 reps
  • Deadlifts, 3 sets of 3 reps with 85–90% of max

After completing a strength or explosive phase, alternate between the two and maybe make a few adjustments. For example, you could switch from a deadlift to a squat or something similar like a snatch grip deadlift. These exercises are just a few examples that can be adjusted to fit your needs. The exercises aren’t as important as the principles employed. The simplicity of a training split such as this will take you very far and make you very fast if you follow it over a period of time. Hopefully, this article gives you some helpful information when it comes to increasing speed.

References
Baggett Kelly. The Simple Guide to Speed Training. Accessed at: http://www.higher-faster-sports.com On: October 13, 2008.

Dintiman George and Ward Bob (2003) Sports Speed. Third Edition. United States of America: Human Kinetics.